Lord Hutton's chosen a second career: comedy

The recently retired law lord has been spinning his forthcoming appearance before the Commons Public Administration Committee (Guardian today) .

He's putting to good use that mastery of deadpan which was seen - and amply revealed in the transcripts - during the course of the Inquiry into the deceased David Kelly.

His opening gag's a killer:

One senior MP close to the Iraq controversy said: "Lord Hutton is deeply unhappy about how his report has been treated, how it was rubbished. He genuinely thought it would put an end to speculation.

Mr Anonymous, perhaps shamefacedly, adds

You may think it's naive for anyone to think that, but it's what he says.

Hutton's sidekick has a fair sense of humour, too.

Brian Hutton, as he then was, before he became Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, was something of a legal enforcer for the Crown in Ulster. He was the guy who told the coroner in one of the inquests into the aptly-initialled 'Bloody Sunday' deaths that it wasn't his (the coroner's) place to question the 1971 (from memory) report on the business by Lord Widgery, also a law lord.

The idea that Hutton is naive is off-the-chart crazy. His motives in producing the one-sided report he did - utterly against the weight of the evidence, in relation to HMG - are still unexplained. But the conclusion that it was done, as the saying goes, with malice aforethought, in the expectation of something like the reaction it got, seems hard to avoid.